NOC Tools and Techniques Joel Jaeggli
The problem... ● Customers place demands on the resources you provide. ● Management and financial considerations place limits on the resources you provide. ● Hardware and software fail. ● The human capital you have available to you is finite.
The solution... ● We're technocrats here, so obviously we're inclined towards a technical solution. ● Deploy instrumentation, management, and collaboration tools to: – Measure, and respond to resource demands. – Identify failures before they affect the users. – Increase the productivity of your workforce. – Help provide guidance to management on demand and costs.
Instrumentation ● Nagios, Big Brother, Big Sister. – Monitor hosts for outages. – Monitor network or hosts resource utilization, do historical trending, monitor service performance, collect and report on snmp traps. ● Smokeping – Perform latency monitoring on network links and services ● Flow export and processing tools. – ip accounting, understanding what traffic is actually on your network.
Instrumentation – Part 2 ● IP inspection tools – Snort, Bro – intrustion detection tools can take a deper look at traffic on your network. ● Accounting tools, the third A in AAA (free radius, open ldap)
Management Tools ● Track changes in router configuration (rancid) ● Do revision control on configuration files for routers and host services (subversion, cvs)
Collaboration ● Maintain your documentation, public web presence, in wikis and content management systems. (plone) ● Support systems, ticket tracking. (RT, Trac, Buzilla). ● Calendering and project management.